The discipline ledger.
Four cadence rituals govern this codebase. They run on a clock, enforced by CI. Their entries are append-only, never deleted, and published as written.
Most companies say they have a quality process. This page is the process — public, dated, every entry retrievable. Drift would show up here first.
Quality Council
every 3 days · activation: Quality Council
A 30-minute synthesis review pulling the ratchet movements, top user-reported issues, top internal regressions, and a forward-looking question that prevents drift into "we always measure these things."
### Top-line numbers (snapshot at B4422) - **Builds since the last council (2026-07-19, B4356):** 66 nominal (B4357 → B4422); **27 non-snapshot commits** in the window against 25 snapshot-bot commits. The shape of this window matters more than the count: 26 of the 27 landed in a four-day burst (2026-07-21 → 07-23), then the repo went **dormant for 76 days**, then B4422 landed today. This is the first council written on the far side of that gap. - **Tests: 13,412 passing across 1,008 `.test.ts` files** — a REAL full `npx vitest run` taken this session (1,028 files, 4 skipped, 123s), not an AUTO-STATE citation. Up from B4356's AUTO-STATE figure o
Trust Decay Audit
every 14 days · activation: Trust Decay Audit
Walks every public claim (homepage, /scoring/standard, /the-receipts, reproducibility seal) against verified implementation facts. Catches drift between what the site says and what the code does before users do.
**Trigger:** Cadence overdue — last entry 2026-07-21 (B4409), **79 days elapsed** against a 14-day target and a 22-day red line. All five cadences breached together after a 76-day repo dormancy (2026-07-23 → 2026-10-08); per SA#18 the owed rituals ship before the pending merge. **Rider this cycle:** B4422 migrated the pipeline to Claude's 5.x generation (Opus 5.5 / Sonnet 5.5 / Haiku 5.5), which is itself a claim-surface event — every public page naming a model, and every
Bet Reviews
every 45 days · activation: Bet Review
Lists 5 builds shipped 45 days ago, marks each as moved-the-metric / didn't / killed. The retrospective discipline — pruning what didn't work is harder than shipping what does.
Fourth Bet Review, filed at B4424. **84 days** since the 2026-07-16 entry; its self-scheduled 2026-08-30 date is 39 days past and CI went red at day 61. **Window reframed, and the reframe is the story.** The protocol says review builds shipped ~45 days ago — that lands on 2026-08-24, which contains **zero commits**. The repo was dormant 2026-07-23 → 2026-10-08 (76 days). Per the house rule (never skip a window), this reviews the last ACTIVE burst,
External Audit Prep
every 45 days · activation: External Audit Prep
Generates the brief for the next external reviewer trio (engineer / songwriter / AI safety researcher). The forcing function that keeps internal claims honest under outside scrutiny.
This is the brief that gets sent to the first three external reviewers once the operator identifies + recruits them. The brief itself is a ritual artifact: it forces us to write down the questions before we hear answers we can't unhear. ### Reviewers - **Engineer:** TBD — target: senior IC at a music-tech company (Splice, Output, LANDR, Native Instruments, or similar). Compensation: $500 + 60-min review every 45 days.
How "overdue" gets enforced
Every push runs npm run check:cadence-health. If any cadence is past its threshold (Quality Council > 7 days, Trust Decay > 22 days, Bet Review + External Audit > 60 days) the gate fails and the deploy blocks. Drift can't accumulate silently — the next push won't go out until the overdue ritual runs and an entry lands here.
That's what makes the discipline real. A ritual unenforced is a ritual that decays. The 22 CI ratchets in the codebase work the same way — every metric only moves down.